The West German Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal.© Atelier Frei Otto Warmbronn
The Pritzker Prize for Architecture has gone to the highly influential German architect Frei Otto – who, tragically, died this week before being able to accept the honour.
Frei Otto, who died Monday at age 89 in Germany, was a cult figure in the architecture profession. An engineer and an architect by training, he built relatively little, but his sophisticated use of lean, lightweight structures made him an influence on the likes of Frank Gehry and last year's Pritzker winner, Shigeru Ban.
The award is architecture's most prestigious honour; modelled after the Nobel Prize, it comes with a $100,000 purse. It usually goes to a living architect. The announcement of Mr. Otto's win was planned for later this month, followed by a formal ceremony in May. The announcement was hastily moved up following Mr. Otto's unexpected death.
Mr. Otto had been notified of his win. In a statement yesterday, the chair of the jury of the Pritzker Architecture Prize, Lord Peter Palumbo, called him "a titan of modern architecture."
The jury citation for the prize said: "Taking inspiration from nature and the processes found there, he sought ways to use the least amount of materials and energy to enclose spaces.
"He practiced and advanced ideas of sustainability, even before the word was coined. He was inspired by natural phenomena – from birds' skulls to soap bubbles and spiders' webs. He spoke of the need to understand the 'physical, biological and technical processes which give rise to objects.'… Otto's constructions are in harmony with nature and always seek to do more with less."
Raised in Berlin, the son and grandson of artists, Mr. Otto was drafted into the German military at age 18 in 1943. He was captured and became a prisoner of war, working as a camp architect at a POW camp near Chartres in France. He earned a doctorate of civil engineering at the Technical University of Berlin in 1954 and practiced until his death.
Mr. Otto was best known for his work for the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, together with Gunther Behnisch. Mr. Otto designed the cloud-like cable-net roofs over the Olympic Park's main stadium and nearby pool.
He had designed a similar cable-net structure for the West German Pavilion at Expo 67 in Montreal, one of the most prominent pavilions at that Expo. The critic Pamela Young wrote later that the "luminous pavilion… looked like the hybrid of a suspension bridge and a cathedral."
Mr. Otto wrote and researched widely on tensile structures, and he was a full professor at the University of Stuttgart. He built relatively little in recent years, though he collaborated on the Japan Pavilion at Expo 2000 in Hannover, Germany with Shigeru Ban – a much younger architect lauded for a similar commitment to building lightly and efficiently.
The Pritzker award ceremony is scheduled to go ahead May 15 in Miami.